Three months of lock down. Months of home schooling, Joe Wicks, online shops, daily walks, online meetings, dropped connections, anxious news checking, disturbed dreams, innovation, contemplation, and renovation. (Okay, not so much of the latter in our house, I think I am resigned to waiting until the kids leave home before I attempt any of that.)

Life has certainly been different.

It has also been interesting to observe the different responses to the change. Some seem to be desperate to ‘get back to normality’, others have been enthused and inspired and are considering new ways of living and working. One thing is for sure; when restrictions lift, supporting people into the ‘next normal’ — with their variety of expectations — is going to be a challenge.

I learned yesterday in an excellent article by Martin Parker (Professor of Organisation studies at the University of Bristol)[1] that the word ‘management’ originally came from the process of training animals (we’ve all had those meetings, thankfully mine are long past now), but the oldest use of the term in English was a verb for the need to deal with complex or adverse matters.

The London Encyclopaedia (1829) describes ‘Managery’ as an obsolete synonyme of management, meaning: instruct in the manner of the fight and teach the ready managery of weapons, or careful planning, necessary because of complexity and danger being faced.

We have certainly needed managery in the last few months and will no doubt keep needing it for some time yet, both during this crisis and onto the next. My daughter (6) keeps repeating that ‘the coronavirus is going to be history’. Both in the sense that one day it will be in the past, but also in that she is living through history as it is made, with all the excitement and fear that goes with it.

A report from the World Economic Forum on the challenges and opportunities facing us in the post-Covid-19 world warns about the possibility of losing more than 300 million jobs and livelihoods. The UN is talking about famine of “biblical proportions”. Major shortcomings in business responsibilities towards workers have been brutally exposed. The rush by some to get back to ‘business as normal’ is completely understandable

Meanwhile, the Scottish government has just published the report of its advisory group on economic recovery:

“In the world before Covid-19, Scotland had the ambition to become a robust, wellbeing economy. That is one that generates strong economic growth with the concomitant creation of quality jobs, and that does so with an unequivocal focus on climate change, fair work, diversity, and equality. Diversity — in all its aspects — is not simply a moral issue; there is conclusive evidence that diversity of thinking leads to better outcomes.”

The challenges Scotland faces are huge and we are going to need all our powers of managery to come through it. I am however heartened by the (almost) overwhelming drive for us to do it differently, working together to ensure our country emerges through this pandemic with a green economic recovery that has inclusion and wellbeing at its heart.

In order to get to the Moon, huge numbers of people, things and places needed to be made, coordinated and controlled. In 1966, NASA employed 36,000 people, with another 400,000 working for 20,000 contractors and 200 universities in 80 countries. There were chains of command, scheduled meeting, plans, predictions, reports and deadlines. Managery at its most extreme! But it inspired. The truly epic nature of the task and that fact that humans were capable of working together to make it happen, led to many things that once had been viewed as science fiction, then becoming possible. The ‘normal’ paused during the moon landings, and the world was viewed afresh.

“For a few short hours, the trivia which normally absorbs us was suspended and people experienced in common the meaning of leadership, greatness, valour, time redolent of timelessness, and common traits. Men became temporarily human and felt the life within them and about. Their corporate life lived for a little and made possible the sign of renewal alter a realisation such as occurs only once or twice in a lifetime.”

Clyde S Kilby was writing about Churchill’s funeral, one that was witnessed by over 350 million people and the largest state funeral in history. Although he may have been writing about an individual on which opinion is considerably divided, his writing evokes the same message as the moon landings, that sometimes the world stops, and when it does, we have the chance to look around us and consider if this is ‘what we want’.

We have had considerably more than a few hours. We have had months.

Some want back what they had, some want something else. It is likely both will be disappointed, because at the moment, we don’t have a clear image of ‘possible’. We have targets (eg net zero by 2045) but what will that look like? What will school be like for my er.. grandchildren? 

“Our approach to natural capital should be founded on the goal that each generation should leave its successor a set of natural assets at least as good as those that they inherited, so that future generations can choose how to live their lives and the economy has natural infrastructure to support it.”- Advisory Group on Economic Recovery

Now, more than ever, we need an image of what our future is going to look like, that new planet – not one that we are travelling to – but one we are going to make. Not for ourselves, but for those that come after us.

“Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.” ― Milton Friedman

This is why I am proposing a competition. I would like to invite our champions, our students, our stakeholders, anyone with a clear vision, to share what they think life on the land (or the water!) will look like in twenty years’ time. The winners will receive £100 experience voucher, but more importantly, their ideas will be published and shared so that others can start to ‘see’ that vision.

Together we can achieve great things — lets increase the number of ideas ‘lying around’ that we can act on and start creating those solutions.

[1] Article by Martin Parker (Professor of Organisation studies at the University of Bristol